% positive wasn't implemented until much later (around 2013 IIRC).
Yes, I agree with this. Anyway, the bottom line is this:
I am very confident that I was karmassasinated or whatever you want to call it. Because I clearly remember having a heated exchange with a couple other posters and right afterwards my karma score dropped a huge amount in a short time, I checked and it was clear that one or more people went back and downvoted lots and lots of my posts in a short span of time.
Apart from my own observations, there is decent evidence that this happened -- otherwise I would not have been mentioned in the earlier thread on this subject.
Viliam_Bur seems quite hostile to any suggestion that it happened to me, it seems he is looking for reasons to deny or downplay it.
The obvious explanation for this is that it's political. The one poster who was banned had politically unpopular views. As I recall, the issue I was karma-killed over was one where I had taken the politically unpopular view.
I do not lose sleep over my karma score or even care about it that much, but what I loath is when politics informs peoples' judgment like this, especially on a discussion board where people are supposed to be on the lookup for this type of behavior.
I do not lose sleep over my karma score or even care about it that much
And so after seven months of being absent from LW you pop up to remind everyone how you were karmassasinated and implying that the moderator was fine with that...
Some time back, I wrote that I was unwilling to continue with investigations into mass downvoting, and asked people for suggestions on how to deal with them from now on. The top-voted proposal in that thread suggested making Viliam_Bur into a moderator, and Viliam gracefully accepted the nomination. So I have given him moderator privileges and also put him in contact with jackk, who provided me with the information necessary to deal with the previous cases. Future requests about mass downvote investigations should be directed to Viliam.
Thanks a lot for agreeing to take up this responsibility, Viliam! It's not an easy one, but I'm very grateful that you're willing to do it. Please post a comment here so that we can reward you with some extra upvotes. :)